Four ways you use social media

If you think about your own behavior, you’ll realize that you use social media in at least four different ways:

Connect – Facebook is a friend network. The reason you visit your Facebook news feed is to see what’s happening with your friends. Updates from brands, including nonprofits, are mostly interruptions.

Discover – Twitter is where you discover interesting pictures, videos, and blog posts. You’ll also make new friends who might eventually become Facebook friends. YouTube is where you discover awesome videos, either by searching or browsing categories and trending videos.

What’s great about these applications is that they leverage the strength of Facebook by encouraging donors to share your fundraiser with others, see friends who have also donated, and make fundraising transactions more frictionless. Continue reading →

It’s a challenge that every nonprofit, school and community organization faces in a soft economy: donor money is more necessary than ever, but many donors are reducing the size of their gifts or the number of organizations they support.

Solution: make it worth the donor’s while to contribute to your cause. GoodTwo is a fundraising platform that rewards donors with great deals and offers from businesses (think online deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial) while also generating donations for fundraisers. We provide a way for fundraisers to connect with their donors by giving something back.

How it works

GoodTwo works with a variety of brands across the country to create great offers that have a built-in donation to a cause in each sale.

Causes like yours come to www.goodtwo.com and sign up for a free fundraiser. It takes about five minutes to create your GoodTwo page.

Select from all of the deals that we have available across the country, based on the ones that your donors would like best.

Promote your page using our built-in e-mail, Facebook and Twitter tools. Every time one of your donors buys one of the deals, they save money and you get a donation!

Every time someone texts “tp4bc” to 60611, the textPlus mobile address, textPlus will donate $1 to Boarding for Breast Cancer, a non-profit, youth-focused education, awareness, and fundraising foundation whose mission is to increase awareness about breast cancer, the importance of early detection and the value of an active lifestyle.

textPlus, a mobile app, offers users free texting with group text capability. What’s cool is that Drew’s employer GOGII is the mobile app developer behind textPlus, a free group texting application available on the iPhone and Android platforms. Continue reading →

Use the power of the social Web to make an impact

The earthquake that shook Haiti last week demolished and devastated the entire nation. Looking at pictures online, reading testimonials of survivors and following the developments in the rescue and emergency response teams, I felt, like many of you, overwhelming sadness. Mere weeks after completing my Kiva Fellowship last summer, the Philippines were hit with Typhoon Ondoy, another natural disaster resulting in true devastation.

I was looking back on pictures from the Philippines and wanted to share the slideshow above from when I went to visit Bernardita Dayo, a Kiva borrower that I had actually funded before I became a Fellow. Looking at those pictures, their homes located so close to the water, I’m reminded that for every picture we see of Haiti NOW, just last week there were other pictures showing THEN.

The pictures above, that village, doesn’t exist in the same way after the Typhoon, now it is just a memory as the Filipino people work to rebuild their villages and homes so too now does Haiti have a long and turbulent road ahead of them. The “then” in their pictures were vibrant lives and villages with personality, history and culture whose path has now forever been changed.

When you give to help Haiti, and you should, $5-$10 is little to most of us but means the world to them, I’d like to ask you to remember that you’re giving not just to help the Haitian people out of their dire current situation, but investing in their future and the rebuilding of the parts of their society and community that helped define them.

Last week, Chris Garrett and I gave a Techsoup.org presentation called Measuring Social Media ROI. A participant asked, “What is a widget?,” which Chris and I tried to explain, but only had limited time.

Thinking it might be useful to source the answer from an expert, I invited Eric Schrader of the social fundraising company givezooks! to answer two questions.

What is a fundraising widget?

Eric: A fundraising widget is a portable version of a campaign or personal fundraiser that you can think of as an ad for the fundraiser. And like an ad, it gets placed where potentially interested audiences will see it.

Like successful ads, it’s not good enough to be seen — it needs to move the person to action. Most fundraising widgets do that by letting people know what the fundraiser is for, what the goal is, how much has been raised so far, who else has given, how much it takes to make a specific impact and any number of other things about a fundraiser.

The nice thing about widgets is that once you place them, they update themselves — a widget typically pulls the latest status of the fundraiser from the main fundraiser webpage. Also, clicking on the widget typically will take you to the main fundraiser page.

Why are they important?

Eric: Widgets allow supporters to promote your fundraising on various websites. Whether it’s a supporter’s blog or a corporate sponsor’s website, a non-profit can get exposed to a whole new audience via a widget. Continue reading →